The dank insulated holding cell in which she was placed segregated the
Judge from the jail's general population. At her request a blank sheet of
parchment was given to her, along with a quill dipped in inkwell. She drafted
a brief motion to the duty magistrate, in which she moved that an evidentiary
hearing would be held. She argued that before the court irrevocably tarnishes
a Lady's reputation by an extreme measure such as an arrest and a murder indictment,
an evidentiary hearing should be held, which would allow the court to ascertain
Lady Emma's involvement, if any, in the matter of Penurius' death. She also
demanded to be released forthwith so that she would be able to duly prepare
her case and present it before the court. She sealed it and handed it over
to her lieutenant for filing at her behest with the court.

Judge Midonas granted her motion and set
a short date for the hearing to take place in two days time.

The prostitute
in the alehouse

The Justice had
no desire to spend the night in her regal domicile. A respite from perpetual
reminders of her office and duties was what she sought. That was why she removed
all indications of her identity, namely her Judge's robe, her gavel and the
ribbon.

The tavern in which
she chose to do her guzzling that night wasn't one of the more renowned or
prestigious ones in the Realm, but rather the opposite. The tariffs of the
meretriciously looking alehouse could have been afforded even by beggars.
The odds of chancing a person she knew and having to make polite conversation
were slimmer in this tattered establishment, and it suited her perfectly.

The tavern was
rambunctious, compliments of a pack of youth patently challenged by handling
liquor. They were drumming the table with their mugs, not unlike some lower
order of primates, and harassing a miserable unattended slattern. But the
Justice browbeat them to quit and they did.

She sat at the
bar. Her head drooped between her shoulders and her tousled red hair veiled
both sides of her profile. As she brooded over a mug of mead, contriving her
future moves, the Murky Justice felt a feminine touch, a small hand resting
upon her broad shoulder.

"May I be
of service and alleviate the burning in your loins, Warrior?"

The Justice turned
to find an appealing woman who had yet to finish her third decade of life.

"Granted."
The Justice discounted offhand. "I'm actually surprised you know what
I look like. Most of my subjects haven't the first clue." The Justice
paused and quickly scanned her mind through countless faceless women she has
taken over the years in the hopes of placing her, then quietly added almost
embarrassed.

"Have I…?!"

"Unfortunately
you haven't, my Lord," came the bold reply.

The Justice raised
a questioning eyebrow.

"I remember
how rays of sunshine produced asterisks as they bounced off my Lord's golden
armor. I remember my Lord's red hair dancing in the warm wind. Valiant my
Lord was the day of her enthroning, maintaining her stance before her people
with a swordsman's grace. I hadn’t even gotten my first blood back then, but
I remember blushing when thinking whether all your legs were as strong
as your arms, my Lord." The hazel-eyed woman reminisced as if never before
had she shared the cherished memory with another. The woman was sweet and
sweeter was her tongue.

The Justice took
a hearty draught of mead and signaled the barkeeper for a refill while the
sentient woman perched by her side took advantage of the Justice's proximity
and studied her troubled visage.

"What is upon
my Lord this night?" Her question was softly spoken. "Is it the
lurid court hearing?"

"You've heard
about it?! Already?!"

"Word of the
hearing is spreading faster than a fire in a thistle field." She answered,
and then added with a canny smile, "Besides, some of my best customers
are members of the legal community."

The Justice simply
had to mirror the expression on the woman's face, but shortly after, her face
turned sullen again. "There's a woman," she began then dallied a
bit to consider her words.

Her companion took
advantage of the recess and replied with a hint of disappointment, "There
always is,"

"There's a
woman I have to find a way to staunchly defend without it conflicting with
my duties and obligations as Chief Justice and Ruler," the Justice finally
said and downed another swig.

The harlot gazed
continuously at the Justice, "I can see into the hearts of Warriors,
and I've seen this exact expression my Lord is wearing now on more faces than
I care to remember…A gift of my trade." She sounded almost commiserating
over her Master. "You lo…"

"Don't be
absurd!" The Justice cut her off mid-sentence and left the harlot mute.

The harlot waited
a few minutes to allow the awkwardness to pass along with them. "Does
my Lord fancy some company to keep her bed warm tonight? Free of charge. It
would be my pleasure to fulfill a longtime yearning."

The Justice let
out a deep heavy grunt as she reached for her inside pocket and retrieved
two golden coins, "Perhaps some other time. My mind is too preoccupied
tonight." She took the smaller hand into hers, gently unfolded the shorter
fingers and placed the golden coins in the harlot's palm. "Take the rest
of the week off, my dear."

"My Lord is
too kind,"

"Can I trust
you to keep this little encounter of ours a secret?"

"My Lord can
trust her slave. A good wench is a discrete wench, and I'm very good at what
I do."

The mischievous
wink she sent was enthusiastically received by the prostitute. She paid her
tab and retired upstairs to the room she had reserved for the night.

With nothing but her leather breeches, the
Judge climbed into bed and waited for serenity to claim her. Alas her mind
drifted to Emma again, to lying with Emma, specifically.

With Emma it was
never merely fucking, never purely distilled lust. They were bound to one
another by their embroiledsentiments
and libertine needs. What the Judge perceived as her separate and individual right to possession that is not shared with any other
person was borne by her every touch, as though the Lady was owned in severalty
by her. That dark retaining desire was the very thing that fulfilled Lady
Emma's sexual aspirations, and made her capable of being utterly sated in
this way only by the Judge.

It appeared to
be the source and provenance of Emma's craving. The Judge was the only one Emma
felt the most anxious around, for she realized the more the Judge craved her,
the more dangerous and unpredictable she became. It was that danger that made
the Lady's skin hum, her sex wet, wide and willing and her desires seethe,
and so she elaborated and further perfected her hazardous habit of sticking
her hands inside the Judge's cage. The prospect of the preternatural undomesticated
darkness beneath the surface that could erupt at any given moment thrilled
the Lady immensely. She had tasted the Justice's leather belt and felt the
strength and mass of her arm, but she knew full well that the Justice held
back her full-blown viciousness and turpitude for her benefit
and wholesome well being. Emma could stand on the banks of the abyss, but
wasn't capable of falling unguarded into it.

Perhaps the greatest
paradox was that it was the Judge's emotions for the Lady that convoked her
demons and the very same emotions that were the Lady's warders against those
demons and kept her from graver scathing.

And there was jealousy,
of course, which was an unerring inciter of the irate green-eyed monster,
for jealousy fuses megalomania and self-abandonment. The Justice's jealousy
that seemed to be stemming out of nowhere was limitless. Whenever Emma would
abundantly barter love and affection with another, the Justice would do her
very best to arrest within her the tyranny of Darkness, which was constantly
in search for the flimsiest of excuses to volley forth. More often than not
she would succeed. Jealousy is a dog's bark, which attracts thieves, she
understood.

She used to tease
Emma on occasion; 'I hope you're sensible enough to practice safe sex'
She would say, 'Copulating with other Warriors can seriously damage
your health' - a polite warning.

She knew Emma would
reserve the performing of certain sexual acts for her alone, acts which she
wouldn’t perform on others, even though the Judge had never asked it of her,
and it made them all the more special to her. The bed was the arena in which
the Justice had power.

At the end of the
day, the Lady practiced physical fidelity. Still, the Justice hadn’t weaned
away from renting innumerable petite blondes so that they would whisper dictated
endearments in her ears, such as "My Dark Prince", an epithet which
the Lady had called her once, while she would face away from them and whisper
'Emma' into theirs. Except for the night when they were paid extra
to service her degrading cruelty.

Preempting Emma had felt like a Pyrrhic
victory. Their brittle liaison was far from being stagnant, but rather managed
itself in a convoluted fashion, for quite soon after their consummation night
the volatile heartthrob Lady had started curtailing her affections, and her attentiveness had begun
to wane and corrode into pittance, the Judge sensed from time to time. Their
ever-lessening assignations chastened the Judge and the trafficking of her
emotions, or so she perceived, brought about acrimony, indignation and the
unshakable sensation of destitution.

To her chagrin, the Bencher could never accept that affections have
been given so gratuitously by the Lady to others, and yet so difficulty and
stinted to her. When
it came to bestowing those emotions upon her, Lady Emma seemed to have been
less than magnanimous, thus relegating the Judge into a spayed scavenger,
a jilted monomaniac.

The Dream

Dreams are visited
upon the troubled minds, and the Justice was no exception to the rule in that
regard.

In her dream, a
thick heavy darkness one could almost touch was ambient like an omnibus cloak.
The dream Justice groped the surface beneath her palms till she found a single
candle and a box of matches. She struck a match. The small flame nearly blinded
her sight at first, and when it simmered down, she lit up the candle. Dispelling
the darkness, the light unveiled a bottle of fine whisky, with not a single
drop in it. Only then did she appreciate how heavy her head felt on her shoulders.
With no recollection of imbibing alcohol, she found herself soundly inebriated
and she wasn't too used to the sensation. Barely having any emotions as it
were, she was never too keen on desensitizing the few that she actually had.

She gripped the
candle and with a broad slow movement of her arm, she illuminated her surroundings.
She was situated in the Lodge's bar, only it looked nothing like the Lodge
in reality, but in her mind she knew it was. As the cast rays were arcing
in the shadows, she spotted Lady Emma standing with a familiar malcontented
expression on her face, as if the last person she wanted to see was the Justice.

A lightning, then,
tore the firmament outside, and through the glass window it shed silver light
on the bar for a fraction of a moment, yet no rumblings of a thunderclap followed.
As she affixed the candle erect on the bar, the Justice remembered earlier
days when she hadn't cared whether it had been love or hatred she had seen
in the malevolent spiteful eyes, believing fire was fire.

"You're drunk".

Underneath Emma's
statement of fact, the astonishment in the Lady's voice was registered by
the Justice. Emma had never seen her drunk before.

"Quite heavily,
I believe. Would you join me for a nightcap?" The Drunkard offered and
reached for the bottle, but control over her faculties being diminished by
aqua vitae caused her to be wide of the mark. Her glare intercepted the trajectory
of the bottle till it smashed against the floor, shuttering into small fragments
without making a racket. It reminded her that the bottle had been empty.

"I think you've had enough. I do tolerate
the sober Judge better." The Lady pushed back her shoulders.

"Well, I trust
she would make an appearance tomorrow around noon at the earliest with one
hell of a hangover," the intoxicated dream Justice staggered to her feet.
"Would you care to leave her a message?" She finally stiffened her
lengthy body to keep from waddling as she covered the distance between herself
and the retired assassin.

An uncanny force
compelled her to seek the guttering candle amidst the blackness. Intently,
she fixated her eyes on its melting wax, as if it was narrating the secrets
of the universe to her. She immediately understood the significance of it,
as though in absolute lucidity.

Livid, the Judge
grabbed Emma's lapel and hoisted her in the air. Her alcohol-induced strength
was unrivaled and formidable.

"You used
to melt," the dream Lord stated like she had just caught some eluding
truth for the first time. She then careened her head slightly to the left
as though to better penetrate dream Emma with her glare, "You're not
melting anymore," she accused. To the dream Lord and Lady these words
made perfect sense. But to the awoken Lord it would have been inscrutable.

Rough
hands landed Emma prone on her back atop a table. The hands pursued to further
widen the generous cleavage and the tearing of the fabric, like before, made
no noise. "Let's face it..." The soused Justice said as she secured
one hand over Emma's mouth while the other lifted up the frock and shredded
the feminine undergarment as if she had knives for fingers. "This is
all you've ever really wanted," she said with a curious smile that was chilling in its gentleness.

The Judge unbuckled
her leather belt. "Nothing but a whore you've been with me,"
she tried not to slur her words. She wanted her words of exhortation limpid.
She incapacitated her opponent, which was no bigger than half her size, against
the table.

With her mouth
throttled Emma was incapable of offering her usual flouting prattles, much
to the Judge's delight.

"Love," the well-coiffed Protagonist
began whilst leading the distended head of her protruding phallus into Emma's
opening, "is tedious redundant blabbering. Lust," she continued
and pushed herself into Emma's sex, "is brief and to the point."
She withdrew the enormous pulsating assault-organ, and burnished its length
with Emma's gush of moisture, but her need to have knowledge of Emma and to
share knowledge with her ushered it back into its natural habitat.

The groggy Lord
could feel her erection being augmented, becoming harder and stiffer inside
the dripping core. She could feel Emma's wet tight depth squeezing against
every nerve ending along her meaty shaft.

"I've killed
my love for my parents," the first thrust of her member was barbaric
and scathing, but the Justice didn't hear a scream. "I've killed the
love I had for my brother." She crammed herself into Emma a second time
and the friction along her length sent her inflamed arousal soaring. "I've
killed my first love for a woman." Even if she had wanted to the Judge
couldn't keep herself from driving every one of the many inches of her cock
in and out of Emma's womanhood, dipping it forcefully again and again for
her selfish satisfaction and hearing nothing but her own crude voice.

Emma heard the
chill in the Justice's voice; she felt the shaming penetration between her
legs and the humiliating betrayal of her body, as her hips bucked up, rooting
against the Judge's drillings in her. She turned her head away from the Justice,
but the Justice gripped her face in her hand and forced the Lady back to meet
her eyes. "You see, when it comes to love," the rhythm of her pounding
quickened as did her rasping grunts of cathartic pleasure, "I am
the bleeding assassin." She stabbed Emma's cunt nearly splitting it.
"The craftsman," another raw jab roved into the swollen slit, "The
marksman," the ram that followed her latest words was the deepest yet
and elicited an unbridled cringe out of the Lady. The Judge suddenly halted
herself, still buried inside the quivering slick flesh.

Never
neglecting her gagging hand over the Lady's mouth, she leaned down till she
almost covered the prostrated Lady. When her face was but a hair away from
Emma's, she asked a question that imbued fear of a previously unprecedented kind in the Lady, for she
was presented with something that had never occurred to her.

"How hard
do you think it would be for me to kill the love I have for you, my
harridan?" The Lord Justice asked as her mouth was at the Lady's ear,
and her thick tongue traced its rim. Her voice was staid, low and hoarse and
her eyes were extinguished, inert and glazed like marbles. They peered directly
into the eyes of the lachrymose lady but couldn't be bothered enough with
seeing them.

The Justice's sharp teeth sank into Emma's
erect nipple, making the sensitive bud buzzing with heat.

When raging jealousy was upon her, her humanity
evaporated like dust in the wind, and all that remained was the body, a machine,
operating on its own accord, driving her forward to quell the voices inside
her that chanted "Mine! Mine! Mine!".

As she resumed humping Emma's womanhood,
the Justice saw a vision of herself chaining the Lady up in the stables, taking
a crop to her and with her exacting hand teaching her the very definition
of 'Possession', by introducing flagellation that would leave beautiful burning
welts all over Emma's overwrought flesh.

In her dream, a
hot iron rod materialized in her clutching merciless hand. The scales-shaped
insignia on its circled end was her crest, and it disseminated a healthy orange
glow like a freshly salvaged ember still ensnaring live fire.

"You should
count your blessings. I'm too drunk to hold a dagger steadily enough to carve
your tits with…" she grimaced and with a fierce backhand stung the Lady's
breast, which the mere sight of provoked and enraged her. "You have grown
too independent, too impertinent and too spoiled
to mind," the Justice chided.

Maintaining her
scowl, her steel grasp put an end to the smaller frame's pointless flailing,
leaving Emma with nothing to do but shrink above the table, eyes riveted on
the burning metal.

"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel
as the underworld: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most
vehement flame. The very flame of the Lord." The Justice recited from the "Song of Songs"
and with the incandescent iron rod she reinforced her words
by heartlessly stamping Emma's milky taunting breast, branding what was Hers
just above the roseate nipple. The sizzling grilling of the guilty flesh,
like Emma's shrieks of horror, cries and whimpers of harrowing pain fell on
deaf ears, as though the Judge had been submerged under water, incapable of
hearing anything that existed outside her head.

The Judge examined the cauterized wound.
"Like a birthmark…" She smiled sinisterly, and the virile rocking
of her pelvis continued, "You should have been born with it," she
said and ran a probing finger over the permanent, long overdue memento she
had singed into the appalled and hurting Emma.

Emma's
body trembled with sheer fright and the frenzied beatings of her heart were
matched by the clouting of her cunt wringing the Justice's dominating cock,
vigorously harvesting its spurting zenith. She felt a slap against the lower
part of her buttock that rested on the edge of the table, in the way of a man praising a
horse who has carried him well.

The Judge abruptly
woke with the startle of a severe climax. Her breathing was fast and shallow
and the palpitations nearly ripped her ribcage open. She was covered with
the sheen of frosty sweat. She lifted the covers to find her breeches had
been sullied by the aftermath of the furious involuntary lust-letting. She
seated herself upwards and looked out the window.

A crescent moon
was still hanging over nocturnal skies. Deciding that the time for rumination
was over and an
early start was necessary anyway, the grim solicitous Lord departed from the tavern and set out to do to
what seemed like the unfeasible.